Detailed Help

The Player Forecast Manager is one of many tools we provide to our fantasy subscribers in order to help them draft the most productive team possible. It utilizes PECOTA projections and organizes them for you, based on your inputs, in order to tell you who you should be drafting, and, in the case of auctions, how much you should be paying for them.

The PFM has loads of customization available to it, and we've been tweaking it over the years (and continue to do so) in order to make it that much more effective, so we're updating our "Tips and Tools" article to better serve your needs. If you're ever lost about what the PFM does, or how specific functions work, you can reference this article, and hopefully find your answers within.

We'll go through, step-by-step, starting from the top left of your options.

Finances

Disposition: Your options here are Conservative, Moderate, and Aggressive, and based on what you tell the PFM to do, it will show you higher or lower auction prices for the best available players. Essentially, if you want to field a team of Stars and Scrubs, you would select aggressive, and then the PFM would reflect your strategy in its suggested price. Conversely, a more conservative approach would spread the money around more of your roster, while a moderate approach would try to balance both.

Positional Adjustment: This option utilizes the idea of replacement level (based on the parameters of the league you are in) in order to determine both dollar value and the position at which a player is most valuable. For example, in a standard 5x5 league with two catchers, one first baseman and a corner infielder, Victor Martinez would first be listed as a C before a 1B, and priced like he's a member of the backstop elite as well. Without the positional adjustment, Martinez' price drops precipitously—we suggest you leave positional adjustment on in order for the PFM to rightfully weight a player's projected contributions and dollar value.

Use Inflation: Inflation accounts for the picks made in your league—at the start of a draft, every player has an expected value, but as players come off of the board, the price for the remaining players may fluctuate. This is subtle, but can build over time, based on your needs and what is remaining.

User-Centric Inflation: This was a change instituted a few years ago in order to make the PFM "smarter" about how it inflates the value of players as the draft goes on. User-centric inflation adjusts the values of the players left to draft by looking at what you have and figuring out what else you need. If you have already drafted saves or steals, the focus of values suggested by the PFM will shift elsewhere in order to keep you from wasting too many picks or dollars on speedsters or closers (though this works for any statistic or category you are working with in your league).

Standings Gains Points (SGP) Level: If you want to utilize the effects of SGP in your PFM values, in order to reduce the value of someone like a Scott Podsednik, who steals a lot of bases but doesn't do much else to help you, then you should turn this feature on. Nate Silver wrote about SGP when it was first introduced into the PFM in 2007.

League

This is fairly straightforward—League Type lets you choose between whether you are playing in a Rotisserie or a Points-based league. Draft Type lets you signify an auction or a straight (or snake) draft. League Used is simply AL- or NL- only, or a mixed league. You can input the number of teams in your league, and since there is no dropdown menu, you can enter whatever quantity you use. You can also adjust the budget allowed your team in an auction setting from here—simply input the total budget, then how much you would like to spend on hitters, and the pitching column will fill itself in. You can also input the lowest salary allowed in Minimum Salary, as well as the minimum number of games played in order to be eligible at a position.

Display

This section allows you to tidy up the tables generated by the PFM. You can choose to set a minimum for dollars or points here—if you only want the best of the best shown, you can do so. You can show playing time—which just plops projected PA, AB and IP columns into the table, as well as their league, team and age via Biographical Data.

Position Counts

This section allows you to modify what positions you need for your league's rules. The boxes are filled in for you with default values, so be sure to edit these as necessary before you start, or else the data returned by the PFM will not be as accurate as it could be for your situation. Player values change depending on how many of each position you need—if you were to play in a hypothetical league where three shortstops were necessary (standard 5x5 otherwise) the cost of players like Elvis Andrus and Hanley Ramirez would rise significantly due to scarcity.

Hitter and Pitcher Categories

This is where you choose what statistics and categories your league is using. The default is set to standard 5x5, but if your league uses on-base percentage instead of batting average, you can change that and have it reflected in the PFM values shown. Were you playing in a 1x1 league that used WARP, Albert Pujols and Adrian Gonzalez would come in at prices that are nearly unheard of in standard leagues due to their Gold Glove caliber defense mixed with two of the most productive bats in the league. Getting this right is important, but the fact it's this customizable, and can always tell you the proper value of the players within your league, is what makes the PFM as useful as it is.

I'm in a Head to Head League. Each week 2 teams are matched up and compete head to head in 18 categories (9 hitting, 9 pitching). Each category is treated like a game in terms of wins and losses. So after a head-to-head matchup in week 1, if my team wins 12 category matchups and loses 5, and ties 1, then my record after week 1 will be 12-5-1. I think this is how most H2H leagues work. Would "points" or "rotisserie" league type come closer to replicating H2H? Any other tweaks I can make to accurately replicate this?

It's due to the minimum price shown. Change that setting to allow more players to show up--the PFM isn't going to display the players who are worth negative dollars if you leave the minimum amount displayed at zero.

I'm in a 10x10 league, and all but one of the categories is listed as an option on here. That one category is ASSISTS and is a category for hitters. This is an important category, because it elevates middle infielders and third basemen in the league. Is there any way to apply this to the player forecast in a customer manner?

Is there a way to by-pass the batter/pitcher budget breakdown? In essence, I'd like to leave it as a variable and have the spreadsheet suggest optimal salaries based upon a "total" budget of $260...not a breakdown of that budget between batters and pitchers.